Hot Stamper Pressings of Top Quality Jazz Albums Available Now
Not long ago we dropped the needle on a copy of OJC 323 and thought the sound was not good enough to please the serious audiophiles we cater to, especially at the prices we charge.
As far as we can tell, based on this single pressing, Smooth Sailing from 1988 on OJC is not an album that would end up being worth the cost associated with finding, cleaning and playing enough copies for a shootout.
We can’t say that there aren’t good sounding pressings of the album though. If we happen to hear a good sounding one down the road, we would certainly consider spending the money to do a real shootout in order to make the best sounding copies available to our customers.
As I’m sure you know, 1961, the year in which Smooth Sailing was first released, happens to be a great year for top quality analog recordings, as can be seen from this illustrious group of albums.
Rudy Van Gelder is an extremely talented engineer, one of the greatest of all time. I suspect that the problems with the sound of this OJC pressing were caused by poor quality remastering, something that does not surprise us in the least.